Cannabis and Industrial Hemp

This plant has been a natural source of food, energy and protection from the elements for thousands of years. Up until the time our government passed the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937, there were thoughts that this natural resource, on a commercial scale, would provide fuel oil from seed that would power cars made of hemp-resin body panels. Henry Ford himself was a pioneer in this field. 
 

Politically, however, lobbyists from petrochemical corporations like DuPont and the fossil fuel industry were pushing hard to have the natural resource outlawed and with the Marijuana Tax Act, they succeeded.

Later administrations, like Nixon and then Ronald Reagan, found it convenient to cast the using of Cannabis as primarily a problem with people of color, or drug-addled liberals, and used it to lock up resistors, minorities and poor people. The "War on Drugs" is a failed, corrupt program. 

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Cannabis should be fully legal at the federal level. Prisoners convicted of minor marijuana crimes should be released. Investment should be made into communities of color that have been disproportionately burdened by the prolonged and misguided war on drugs.

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We should be cultivating marijuana nationwide for its industrial uses and for its medicinal properties and investing in research to further our understanding and discover new applications. We should be investing in and encouraging the farming of industrial hemp for a variety of applications throughout the manufacturing, construction, energy and clothing industries. 

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This is especially important for the agricultural industry in our District. As we progress, there should be an effort to maximize the ag land use with a diverse collection of the most productive and environmentally friendly crops. Focusing purely on the highest profit will only lead to problems down the road. We need to reduce water, pesticide and chemical fertilizer use. We need to utilize new farming techniques that are more organic and holistic. We need to focus on crops that can potentially sequester substantial amounts of carbon dioxide during and after production. We need to work on new irrigation technologies so we can conserve the precious lake waters in our district and restore them to historic flow patterns that better serve the biodiverse habitats in which we all live. This will take effort and creativity on the part of the agricultural community, but I believe that our farmers and our communities are fully up to the task. As your US Representative, I would much rather support farm subsidies that helped the small and medium sized family farms convert their operations to new crop utilization and production rather than continue to subsidize the large corporate farms for their losses on crops with which we've become uncompetitive or cannot utilize here at home.